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It wasn't Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer who was shot and killed, but it was close.

It was Minnie the white-tailed deer. A pet deer.

It was the Minnie who wore two orange "Don't shoot me" dog collars around her neck, the Minnie who was raised by the Trotter family just north of here since she was a fawn, the Minnie who would come into their home if the front door were left open and finish off whatever food was on the table -- who slept out back in a bed of straw next to the family's two deer hounds, hunting dogs who knew the difference between her and the deer who were quarry, and who would defend her from the local wolf pack with their lives.

This is the Minnie who was shot and killed a week ago Friday, allegedly shot as she stood by the side of the road by a hunter from Cobourg packing a muzzle-loader, two days before the muzzle-loader deer hunt came to an end.

"She was the daughter my mother never had," says 17-year-old Dylan Trotter, the day after Minnie's funeral.

And he is only half joking. His mother smiles.

"Don't laugh," says Kelly Trotter. "Because it's true."

Kelly Trotter was sitting at the kitchen table when she heard the gunshot and she knew, instinctively, what had happened.

And then Lucky, one of two Trotter house dogs (Rascal being the other) who followed Minnie around as if her shadow, came running up to the house with her tail between her legs, scared stiff and in a panic.

She had obviously witnessed the entire thing.

"Minnie would not have even flinched seeing someone walking towards her with a gun," she says.

"When it came to people, she was all trust."

Minnie was called Minnie because she was tiny when she came into the Trotters' lives as a fawn, so small she could be held in the palms of their hands.

"That was two years and five months ago," says Scott Trotter. "The third week of June."

Scott Trotter runs a plumbing business his father started, and has lived in the community of Cooper, a few kilometres northeast of Madoc, for his entire life.

His entire family hunts: Wife Kelly, and their two sons, the aforementioned Dylan and 14-year-old Hunter.

But Minnie was special.

"A road construction crew found her, and brought her to us," says Scott Trotter. "We weaned her on cow milk, and got her strong enough to be on her own, but she stuck around."

"And she became like family," adds Kelly.

Every year during the deer hunting season -- and Minnie had survived two of them -- Kelly Trotter would fit Minnie with not one, but two, orange blaze dog collars so that deer hunters might think twice about shooting her.

"Our neighbours worried about her too," says Kelly. "One offered to lock her up in their barn until the hunt was over, but that didn't seem like it would be fair, either.

"So we let her take her chances." Earlier this year, Minnie had her first

family.

They were triplets.

One died shortly after being born, and two others were taken by wolves -- a wolf-coyote mix known in these parts as Tweed wolves, named after the town not far to the south.

"Minnie had a good life and a rough life," says Scott Trotter. "She survived one run-in with a car, and she survived one run-in with a wolf who tore the tendon in her hind leg.

An OPP press release indicated a Cobourg-area hunter is under investigation by the Ministry of Natural Resources for "various hunting offences."

The "alert citizen" who wrote down the hunter's licence plate was, as it turns out, one of the Trotter boys.

"He was there in a flash," says his mother.

Dan VanExan is the MNR officer doing that investigation, but he would not comment when reached at his home, or name the alleged offender.

And nor would he confirm the hunter's "I just killed Rudolph" comment, as apparently told to the Trotters, when he saw that the deer he had just shot was wearing two orange safety collars, making it obvious that it was someone's "pet" -- just as the OPP release pointed out.